Honda GL1000 Gold Wing

The custom motorcycle scene is driven by fashion as much as any other. Over the past couple of decades we’ve seen the rise of the ubiquitous CB750 custom, followed by the SR400/500 and Kawasaki W650. But now I’m starting to wonder if the next trend will be repurposed old sleds like the Honda Gold Wing. They seem to be popping up everywhere, and some of them are quite intriguing.

Here’s one built by Texas-based Ric Becker, who sells and restores tandem bicycles for a living. In his spare time, Ric likes to build faster machines—like this 1976 GL1000. It arrived at his door as a gift from a customer who didn’t want to see the bike go to waste: although it had only 23,000 miles on the clock, it’d spent several years outside, rusting away. Ric spent the next seven months working on the bike, doing all the restoration and modifications himself—apart from the new seat and tail unit, which are aftermarket items.

The exhaust system uses GL1200 headers feeding into Harley-Davidson mufflers but the paint scheme and logos are Ric’s own designs. “I tried to capture a production 1950s-60s look,” he says. Ric’s bike is now the front-runner for the Bike of the Year competition at the Naked Gold Wings club forum: you can see the build in more detail on this thread. [Thanks to Richard Mattrass.]